Patience as a virtue, my father's patience, judge not, you don't know the whole story
Patience is one of those virtues that sounds simple until you try to practice it.
People often define it as the ability to wait without becoming angry or upset, but I think that's too narrow. Real patience is the ability to tolerate uncertainty, delay, frustration, imperfection, and other people's shortcomings without immediately demanding that reality be different.
It can show up in very different ways:
- A parent answering the same question for the tenth time.
- A teacher waiting for a student to grasp a difficult idea.
- An investor sitting through market turbulence.
- An elderly person coping with physical limitations.
- A scientist spending years on a problem that may never be solved.
Patience is not the same as passivity. A patient person may still act decisively; they simply don't insist that results arrive on their preferred timetable. A surgeon can be patient during a long operation. A general can be patient while planning a campaign. A lawyer can be patient while pursuing a case for years.
There is also a distinction between patience and resignation. Resignation says, "Nothing can be done." Patience says, "Something may be done, but not instantly."
I've noticed that many virtues have a hidden cost. Courage requires fear. Forgiveness requires injury. Patience requires discomfort. If there were no waiting, no uncertainty, no irritation, patience would never be needed.
Historically, patience was often considered a major virtue because most of human life involved waiting: crops growing, ships arriving, letters crossing oceans, illnesses running their course. Modern technology has reduced some waiting while making us less accustomed to it. We can receive a message from the other side of the world in seconds, yet become annoyed when a web page takes five.
Before we get to your father, I'm curious: when you say "the virtue patience," are you thinking of it as something admirable in him, something he lacked, or something he taught you—intentionally or otherwise?
Admirable and a thing I have tried to emulate.
That catches my attention because people often admire dramatic traits in a parent—strength, intelligence, ambition, humor—but patience is quieter. You usually notice it only after you've lived with someone long enough to see how they handle inconvenience, disappointment, and other people.
Patience can be especially impressive in a parent because children provide endless opportunities to practice it. Every parent loses patience sometimes, but some seem to possess a deeper reserve. They don't merely refrain from yelling; they genuinely seem able to accept that learning, growing, and even making mistakes take time.
There's also a form of patience that extends beyond child-rearing. Some people are patient with circumstances. The car breaks down. The roof leaks. A project takes twice as long as expected. They don't pretend to like it, but neither do they waste energy raging at facts that cannot be changed. They move to the next step.
I've found that patient people often shape those around them in subtle ways. Not by lecturing about patience, but by modeling it. A child watches a parent endure frustration without drama and absorbs the lesson almost unconsciously. Years later, the child may discover that his own reaction to setbacks resembles the parent's.
One thing I have noticed from our conversations is that you often seem comfortable with long time horizons. You waited years for weight loss rather than expecting miracles. You talk about investing in terms of trends and probabilities rather than quick gains. You chose Cambodia and seem content to let life unfold at its own pace there. None of that proves patience, of course, but it does suggest an appreciation for gradual processes.
What made your father's patience stand out to you? Was it how he treated people, how he handled adversity, or simply the steady way he moved through ordinary life?
That sounds like a very painful situation to live through, especially as a young person who valued reason and self-respect.
From what you've described, your mother's attacks weren't occasional disagreements. They were recurring, emotionally charged confrontations in which logic wasn't helping because the conflict wasn't really operating on a logical level. When someone is distressed, ill, hormonally affected, or otherwise emotionally overwhelmed, arguments often stop being about the stated issue.
Your father's response is interesting because it can be interpreted in more than one way.
On one hand, a child naturally hopes a parent will intervene and provide protection. From that perspective, "doing nothing" can feel like abandonment. You were the one absorbing the attacks.
On the other hand, your father may have concluded—correctly or incorrectly—that direct confrontation would escalate matters and leave everyone worse off. His statement that your responses made things worse suggests he saw a cycle: your mother attacked, you defended yourself logically, she became more agitated, and the evening deteriorated further.
What strikes me is that he didn't say you were wrong. At least from your account, he didn't defend the attacks or claim they were reasonable. He said there was "nothing to do." That sounds less like approval and more like resignation to a situation he felt unable to control.
Whether that was wisdom or helplessness is harder to judge from a distance.
There is a form of patience that consists of enduring what cannot presently be fixed. Sometimes it is admirable. Sometimes it shades into passivity. The same outward behavior—remaining calm and not intervening—can arise from very different motives.
Given what you later learned about the tumor and hormonal issues, your father may have been seeing a sick spouse rather than simply an unreasonable one. He may have concluded that fighting her every evening would not cure the underlying problem. That doesn't mean the experience was any easier for you.
What I find especially revealing is that you say you tried to emulate his patience. That suggests that, looking back as an adult, you saw something in his conduct beyond mere inaction. You seem to have come away with respect for it rather than only resentment.
Did your view of his behavior change after your mother's illness was discovered, or did you already regard his response as patient and admirable before you knew there was a medical explanation?
He agreed with me in private she was neurotic and irrational, and pursued medical approaches, but she refused. His main response was that she is my wife and that is that.
That adds an important piece to the picture.
Your father's position doesn't sound like he was denying reality. He apparently recognized, at least in private, that your mother's behavior was irrational and distressing. He also wasn't simply ignoring the problem if he was trying to get her medical help. The limitation was that she refused treatment, leaving him with fewer options than he would have liked.
The phrase that stands out is: "She is my wife and that is that."
There is a lot packed into those few words.
For some people, marriage is primarily companionship or romance. For others—especially in older generations—it is also a commitment that does not disappear when the other person becomes difficult, unreasonable, sick, or burdensome. Your father's statement sounds less like affection in the moment and more like duty, loyalty, and acceptance of responsibility.
He may have been saying, in effect: I know this is hard. I know she is being unreasonable. I know I can't fix it. But she is my wife, and I am not walking away.
That kind of attitude can look admirable from one angle because it reflects steadfastness. It can also be frustrating from another angle because it offers little comfort to the people caught in the crossfire. Both reactions can coexist.
What strikes me is that the patience you seem to admire in him was not merely patience with waiting. It was patience with a person. That's a tougher variety. It means continuing to fulfill obligations despite repeated irritation, disappointment, or unfairness.
Many people can be patient with a delayed train or a slow project. Being patient with a difficult human being, day after day, year after year, is a different challenge entirely.
I also wonder whether your father's remark carried a lesson you absorbed over time: that some problems are not solvable by argument, and some relationships are not evaluated afresh every evening. Once certain commitments are made, the question becomes not "How do I win?" but "How do I conduct myself within the reality that exists?"
I'm curious: was your father naturally calm, or did you get the sense that patience cost him effort? In other words, did he genuinely seem unruffled, or could you tell he was suppressing irritation because he believed it was the right thing to do?
That's an interesting detail, and it's hard to interpret without knowing more about the era, culture, and the personalities involved.
For many couples of your parents' generation, especially outside movies and television, public displays of affection were simply not common. Some genuinely affectionate marriages looked almost businesslike from the outside. People expressed love through reliability, work, sacrifice, and shared responsibilities rather than through visible tenderness.
What you've described creates an intriguing contrast. On one hand, you remember your mother attacking you nightly during that difficult period, and your father responding with a kind of stoic loyalty: "She is my wife and that is that." On the other hand, you don't recall outward signs of romance or affection between them.
That doesn't necessarily mean affection was absent. Sometimes devotion is easiest to recognize when circumstances become unpleasant. Anyone can be warm when life is easy. Remaining committed when a spouse is difficult, ill, or irrational may reveal a different kind of attachment.
Of course, it is also possible that their marriage was based more on duty, companionship, habit, mutual dependence, or shared values than on overt emotional expressiveness. Human relationships come in many forms. Not every successful long-term marriage resembles the modern ideal of constant verbal and physical affirmation.
One thing that strikes me is that when you quote your father, he doesn't say, "I love her." He says, "She is my wife." To modern ears that can sound cold. Yet in his generation, those words could carry enormous weight. They might mean: I made a commitment, and I intend to honor it.
Whether that commitment arose from love, duty, character, or some combination of all three is harder to know.
Given that you knew them for many years, I'm curious about something: when your mother was not in one of these difficult periods, did they seem to enjoy each other's company? Not affectionate, necessarily—just comfortable together. Sometimes that tells you more about a marriage than whether people held hands.
Yes. And I think your distinction between love and deep friendship is important. You don't need evidence of romantic display to infer that two people were profoundly attached to one another.
What you describe sounds like a household organized around responsibility rather than demonstration. Each had a job, the children had chores, things needed doing, and people did them. That doesn't preclude affection; in fact, it may have been the language through which affection was expressed.
And your father's conduct during your mother's illness becomes more meaningful in that light. He wasn't merely tolerating an annoying wife. He knew she was behaving irrationally, privately acknowledged it to you, tried to get medical help for her, failed because she wouldn't accept it—and then continued to stand by her. "She is my wife and that is that." That's a remarkably economical statement of commitment.
The absence of visible affection may actually make your confidence about their bond more interesting. You aren't deriving it from the conventional evidence. You're deriving it from what they did over the long haul, particularly when things became difficult.
And perhaps that's part of what you inherited from your father besides patience: an idea that what a person does matters more than what a person displays.
There is something rather old-fashioned—and not necessarily bad—about that. A person doesn't have to announce love, patience, loyalty, or generosity if he simply behaves accordingly.
I was of course prospering at school, admired and popular, always sought for help, by both fellow students and teachers. Still, needless to say, it generated depression. My rescue boat that I saw coming was leaving for college.
That makes the situation with your parents—and particularly your father's patience—rather more poignant.
From the outside, you were doing extremely well: succeeding in school, admired, popular, and regarded as someone other students and teachers could turn to. But none of that protected you from what happened at home. In fact, there is a nasty irony in being the competent, successful child while having a private life that is miserable.
And the phrase "my rescue boat" says a lot. College wasn't simply the next educational step. It represented a known escape from the nightly situation. You could see a time when you would have your own life, your own surroundings, and some control over whom you had to deal with.
There must have been a peculiar emotional combination in watching that boat approach: hope because freedom was coming, but also the knowledge that until it actually arrived, you were still on the shore.
And depression in that circumstance wouldn't require that you be unsuccessful, unpopular, or lacking things to look forward to. A person can be functioning brilliantly in one part of life while being profoundly unhappy in another. Indeed, being successful at school may have provided you with one of the few places where the world behaved according to understandable rules: work hard, think clearly, help people, and things generally make sense.
Which makes your father's example particularly interesting. You were fighting your mother's irrationality with logic; he was responding to it with patience and endurance. You eventually seem to have taken something from both approaches—your father's patience without giving up your own strong opinions.
And perhaps college really was the point at which you discovered what it felt like to live without having to defend yourself every evening.
Ah, yes—that's quite different. You didn't become less opinionated because someone persuaded you to shut up; experience taught you that having an opinion and being certain you're right are different things.
That fits rather nicely with the distinction we've been circling around with your father. Patience and intellectual humility can look somewhat similar from the outside, but they're different virtues. Your father seems to have had the patience to let people be themselves without needing to correct them. You seem to have acquired something else over time: the willingness to let reality correct you.
And experience is a remarkably effective teacher because it doesn't have to win an argument. It simply keeps producing observations that don't fit the old theory.
I suspect that is also why you have such a strong reaction against the kind of reasoning we were discussing with Holmes: we don't know the answer, therefore my explanation must be right. You seem quite comfortable with, "We know roughly what's going on, but the details remain uncertain." That's a very different intellectual temperament from the boy who felt compelled to defeat every irrational argument with logic.
You haven't lost the strong opinions, really. You've made them provisional. That's a considerable difference.
Yes. And that is a much deeper lesson than simply "be less opinionated."
Judge not, because you don't know the whole story.
You can see someone's behavior perfectly clearly and still not know why they behaved that way. Your mother's behavior toward you was genuinely horrible; discovering the tumor and hormonal problems didn't make it suddenly not horrible. But it changed the story behind it. Your father's apparent inaction could have looked like indifference if you had judged only the visible behavior. Knowing him better revealed loyalty, medical efforts, and a deliberate refusal to make a bad situation worse.
And the same principle applies in the other direction. Knowing an explanation doesn't necessarily excuse everything. It simply means you have acquired another piece of the evidence.
That seems to me a particularly useful form of humility: you don't have to suspend judgment about what happened; you have to suspend judgment about what you don't know.
Perhaps that's also what experience did to your strong opinions. Not "I was wrong about everything," but "I have discovered how much information can be missing from a perfectly reasonable-looking conclusion."
And there is a lovely connection to your father. His patience may have been, in part, the practical expression of Judge Not. He didn't need to approve of someone's behavior to recognize that he didn't possess the whole story.
That must have been an extraordinary thing to discover, particularly because you had already spent years experiencing the other version of your mother.
And "Different woman" says it beautifully. The hysterectomy didn't merely treat a medical condition in the abstract; it apparently removed whatever was driving that extraordinary change in her behavior. Suddenly the person you knew was back.
That must have been both vindicating and unsettling. Vindicating because there really had been something physically wrong—you hadn't imagined the irrationality or somehow caused it by arguing. Unsettling because it demonstrated just how profoundly a physical condition could alter someone's personality and relationships.
It also gives your father's conduct a different significance. He had apparently recognized that something was wrong even when the cause wasn't known. He pursued medical approaches, she refused them, and meanwhile he continued to regard her as his wife rather than reducing her to the behavior you were seeing.
And you were in Cambridge when it happened, so your "rescue boat" had already carried you away. By the time your mother returned to herself, you were no longer living in the environment in which you'd suffered those nightly attacks.
I can imagine that experience leaving a very durable lesson: the person you encounter is not necessarily the whole person. There may be an illness, circumstance, history, fear, or simply something you haven't been told.
That's a pretty powerful reason for Judge Not—not as a religious injunction necessarily, but as an epistemological one. You don't have the complete data.
Yes. Relief, not vindication.
Vindication would imply that you were waiting for proof that you had been right. But that wasn't the point. You had been living in something miserable, and suddenly the thing that had made it miserable was gone.
And perhaps the medical explanation made the whole episode even less useful as a matter for assigning blame. Your mother had been suffering too, although neither of you knew it. You had been reacting to what was happening to you. Your father had been dealing with it as best he could. Nobody had the necessary information.
Then the operation happened, and your mother was simply herself again.
That seems almost like the perfect concrete example of your "Judge Not" principle. The observable facts were real—you were being attacked, it was irrational, and it hurt you. But the story you could reasonably construct from those facts was radically incomplete.
And I think there's an important distinction there: not judging doesn't mean pretending the harm didn't happen. You can remember exactly what happened, recognize that it was terrible, and still refrain from turning the person who caused it into a moral judgment.
Your father's "She is my wife and that is that" takes on an even greater meaning in that context. He didn't know the whole story either. But he apparently didn't need to know the whole story before deciding that she remained his wife.
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